Bilingualism

• Positive attitudes. A young bilingual benefits from a school culture that recognises becoming bilingual as positive – as leading to increased linguisitic awareness and cultural sensitivity (Bialystok, 2001). The whole school community can benefit from the knowledge and expertise of emergent bilinguals and their parents. Nevertheless, the teacher plays an important role in helping children to become bilingual and helps coordinate formal and informal learning (Gregory, 1996, p. 8). For a most interesting ethnographic study which shows how we might understand and support young bilingual children as individuals, see Drury (2007). The individual strategies used by four children as they cope with nursery school show how each child reflects on their experience. A socio-cultural perspective creates a strong theoretical framework in which to learn from the individual ‘voices’ of the children.

• Knowledge and understanding. Educators need to have as much knowledge as possible about the spoken and written forms of the languages represented in the communities whose children they teach and about the cultural context. Whitehead (1997) acknowledges that we are unlikely to have the linguistic skills and cultural experiences to meet all language needs. The knowledge we need is the kind which supports our professional expertise, see for example Baker (1995) and Cunningham-Andersson and Andersson (2004) for advice for parents and teachers. We can also encourage the participation of parents, grandparents, older siblings and members of local linguistic groups. Indeed to be effective practitioners we need to know about the children’s literacy experiences at nursery schools, play groups and in religious settings in their communities.

Our efforts to become informed about all this communicates to emergent bilinguals and their families the respect we feel for their languages and cultures.

• Interaction with peers. Emergent bilinguals benefit greatly from learning alongside their monolingual peers and the benefits are mutual. The recent trend has been away from setting up withdrawal units where children tended to learn English through de-contextualised exercises. One encouraging thing is that what seems beneficial to emergent bilinguals is also good practice for all children: conversation round practical tasks in science, mathematics and technology (children link language and meaning through a general sense of the context); games where instructions and activities are linked and repeated; stories in a shared and interactive context; writing for real audiences and purposes.

For a more detailed analysis of these issues see Wiles, 1985.

• Story telling and listening. The telling of stories with dramatic expression, gesture and story boards and other props like dolls, boxes and hats helps children learn their new language in an enjoyable way. The very young also learn well through the rhythms of rhymes, songs and verse (see Hester, 1983, for helpful suggestions).

• Reading and listening to stories. When they have stories read to them children experience structured language as opposed to the relatively unstructured language of everyday conversation. This structure – which basically consists of a beginning (providing a setting for a story and an introduction to characters), a middle (where things happen and a plot develops) and an end (at which point conflicts and problems are resolved) – is sometimes termed a ‘story grammar’. The text children hear is stored as a resource for retelling their own stories. Fox (1993) has contributed to our understanding about this. The language resource that written stories provide is valuable to all children and not least to emergent bilinguals (Gregory, 1996).

• Learning to read. Young children learning to read in a second or additional language need careful help over coordinating the cueing systems (Harding-Esch and Riley, 2003). We have to remember that contextual cues may not be as available to them as to other children – even now that we have universal supermarkets and global news programmes. Monolingual children are more secure in the idiom of their language and quickly grasp ‘knife and fork’ and ‘fish and chips’. Children whose first language is in another script have to learn a new set of symbols. Word order in a language also relies on culturally acquired knowledge. As Gregory (1996) shows, young readers in a second language usually catch up quickly, but we still need to be aware of their needs.

• Dual-language texts. These are often traditional stories and criteria for selections are discussed under the entry of this name. The best are a helpful resource but we need to check the quality of the language and illustration. Duallanguage labels and signs are sometimes helpful, but other languages can also be brought into high status curriculum areas like mathematics and geography. Children, parents and teachers can write their own bilingual texts using all the available technology of computers, printers and photocopiers, laminating machines and cameras. As well as producing dual-language versions of stories, poems and songs we can extend our enterprise to anecdotes about the children’s lives, games, birthday cards and letters. Such collaborations could also lead to helpful multi-language materials for real purposes and audiences. Among valuable teaching and learning ideas, Whitehead suggests all children, whatever their first language, listen to nursery rhymes and poems on audiotape, spoken in different dialects and accents (Whitehead, 2005).

• Multicultural resources. All children deserve the very best books and resources from across the world. If we have in our class children whose roots are in a particular country we seek out the best stories from that place. Here we would be helped by Rosemary Stones’ book A Multicultural Guide to Children’s Books.